need to aggressively promote the newservices to cut through all that mobilechatter and inform consumers, says DanDavidson, vice president of marketing atfour-hospital Sunrise Health, serving theLas Vegas region.Since May 2010 the health system hasbeen using software from iTriage LLCof Denver to provide information on itsemergency departments, including cur-rent wait times.

Consumers can access a symptomschecker that helps them determine if theyshould visit an emergency department, andget a list of the closest hospitals.

Finding help

The software will flag the closest ER regard-less of whether it’s a Sunrise Health hospital.The delivery system pays a fee to i Triage foradditional information on their services tobe displayed, such as current wait times andan “iNotify” feature that enables a consumerto let the ER know they are coming in andtransmit their current symptoms.Notifying the ER of a pending arrival,however, doesn’t get the consumer to thehead of the line when he or she arrives un-less the acuity of symptoms compels morerapid action. Text messages, billboards,the Sunrise Web site and other advertis-ing venues have helped increase interest inSunrise hospitals’ ER information service,Davidson says. Displays of ER wait timesand the additional iNotify functions alsois done in hospital elevators and even onhand sanitizers at the airport. “We’re mak-ing information available to the consumerwhere the consumer is looking for us.”Some of the ads have a Quick Read, orQR, code, a newer type of bar code that canbe scanned with a mobile device. The de-livery system can get reports on how manyconsumers are scanning an ad. It’s too early,however, to say how effective those ads are,Davidson adds.

Nothing fancy

Curran advises peers to not give a new mo-bile service a fancy name; make it a namepatients already know. If an organization isusing a specific vendor app, consumers like-ly will search their app store for the vendorname of the app, not an organization-brand-ed name. For example, Dean Clinic keptthe MyChart name of Epic’s patient portal,which also is the name of the mobile app.Physicians, Curran says, are the oneswho have had the most surprises in storewhen working in an environment wherepatients increasingly can get the informa-tion as quickly as the docs can. It’s hap-pened more than once: A patient goesto urgent care and gets a strep test, andwhen the result comes back and the phy-sician returns to the exam room, the pa-tient isn’t there.That’s because the patient already sawthe test result, which was negative, viathe mobile app and left. “It’s shocking toproviders to actually be taken out of thatloop,” Curran says.